Why Lukaku needs to lose some muscle
Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer believes Romelu Lukaku needs to lose some muscle to rediscover his best form. Here, strength and conditioning coach Michael Clegg explains why... THERE are certain things that Romelu Lukaku can do to lose muscle without affecting his overall strength. If Lukaku does a lot of hypertrophy work — which is eight to 12 repetitions on your squats or bench press — it can cause the sarcoplasm in a muscle to increase. That’s not just the muscle itself but the area around it. It’s what bodybuilders do to look bigger but is not always functional. If you reduce those exercises to three to five repetitions, and still do it with a heavy load, it won’t give you that same size increase, but the muscle itself will stay really strong. Lukaku can still train in the gym, but you want to minimise the size of his muscle system. You’d get him doing aerobic conditioning on a watt bike, or rowing and swimming. You don’t want size — you want speed, a fast contraction of the muscle. I want lads with big strong legs but built like a wire in their upper body; little muscle mass but really strong. Imagine a chunk of a tree: you don’t want that. You want something like a poker for a fire. Both are strong, but one puts more demand on the system, which leads to fatigue.